With the Hybrid Cloud effort Microsoft invested heavy to make Windows Server and Hyper-V better connect to Microsoft Azure. One way of doing that is with Windows Admin Center and Azure Site Recovery. The Azure Site Recovery integration in Windows Admin Center, allows you to easily replicate Hyper-V virtual machines to Microsoft Azure. The technology is not new, ASR does exist for a long time and allows you to not only replicate Hyper-V VMs, but also VMware VMs and physical servers. However, with the integration in Windows Admin Center, setting up Azure Site Recovery became super easy.

Set up Azure Site Recovery from Windows Admin Center

In the Virtual Machines extension, you can already see a recommendation to setup ASR: “Help protect your VMs from disasters by using Azure Site Recovery.” Which will guide you through the onboarding steps. If you don’t see that banner, just click on the VM you want to protect and replicate to Azure. Click on More and select “Set up VM Protection“, this will guide you through the same wizard.

If you haven’t connected your Windows Admin Center to Microsoft Azure yet, the wizard will help you to go through and set up this connection.

After your WAC is connected to Azure, you will now setup Azure Site Recovery for the Hyper-V host in Azure. This can directly be done from Windows Admin Center. For example, this will let you select the Azure Subscription you want ASR to connect to. It will let you create a new Resource Group and Recovery Services Vault or use an existing one. After you have done the configuration part, WAC will create the specific Azure resources and configure the Hyper-V host for Azure Site Recovery. This can take up to 10 minutes depending if you are using existing resources or creating new once.

If you have a look at the Hyper-V Replica settings in Hyper-V Manager, you will see that ASR is completely setup and configured.

Microsoft today announced the public preview of disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines. This is basically Azure Site Recovery (ASR) for the Azure-to-Azure scenario. With that you can replicate Azure virtual machines from one Azure Region to another Azure Region, without deploying any other infrastructure components such as software appliances. Cross-region DR feature is now available in all Azure public regions where ASR is available.

The Azure Documentation describes it the following way:

In addition to the inbuilt Azure infrastructure capabilities and features that contribute to a robust and resilient availability strategy for workloads running on Azure VMs, there are a number of reasons why you need to plan for disaster recovery between Azure regions yourself:

You want the ability to protect and recover Azure VMs based on your business decisions, and not only based on inbuilt Azure functionality.

You need to be able to test failover and recovery in accordance with your business and compliance needs, with no impact on production.

You need to be able to failover to the recovery region in the event of a disaster and fail back to the original source region seamlessly.

Azure to Azure VM replication using Site Recovery helps you to do all the above.

To set this up you have to create an Azure Recovery Vault. This Recovery vault cannot be in the same region as the source virtual machines, because if the region is down, you will not have access to the vault.

Form that you can choose to create a new Replication and select the virtual machines you want to replicate. You can select the virtual machines you want to replicate. At the end you choose the target location and create the needed target resources and start the replication.

This will now allow you to failover you virtual machines to another Azure region.

Azure Site Recovery now allows you to replicate Virtual Machines from:

On-premise Hyper-V Servers

On-Premise Hyper-V using System Center Virtual Machine Manager

On-Premise Physical Servers

Virtual Machines from AWS

Virtual Machines from another Azure Region

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My name is Thomas Maurer. I am a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. I am part of the Azure engineering team and engage with the community and customers around the world. I am located in Switzerland. I am focusing on Microsoft technologies, especially cloud and datacenter solutions based on Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack and Windows Server. Opinions are my own.